If you're new here, read a few articles for free. If you're not, share your favorites with others.

If you haven’t noticed, the internet’s changed the world a little. And like music, home video and retail, publishing is an industry that’s been shaken up pretty hard. Figuring out how to be a subscription-funded magazine in the 21st century—how to balance the spirit of the web and social sharing with the financial demands of publishing—is an ongoing project.

The Century used to publish only a small fraction of our print articles in online form. When we launched the current website in 2010, we continued posting a few free articles from each issue—along with making the rest of them available to subscribers only. We’ve been doing that ever since.

This week, we’re making another major change to how we handle online access to Century magazine articles. Instead of limiting most articles to paid subscribers and designating a few to release for free, we’re letting all site visitors read a few recent articles—now of their choosing, not ours—for free. Here’s what this means:

If you’re not a paid subscriber—whether or not you have a free site login—starting today you can view up to three Century articles online each month (or the same one three times, if you want). Virtually all recent articles are now available for you to read as one of these three instances.

If you are a subscriber—and you’ve set up online access and are logged in—you can continue to read all online content for no additional charge.

You can now share recent articles with others who aren’t subscribers, via social media, e-mail and so on. As long as they haven’t used up their three monthly views already, they’ll be able to read the full text.

Archives—defined here as articles that have been posted online for two months or more—will be available only to paid subscribers. Same with the PDF version of each complete issue.

In short: If you’re new to us, you can read three recent magazine articles for free, along with the free blogs, wire stories and briefs/blurbs. If you’re a subscriber—which you really should be—you can read and share everything. Thanks as always for reading.

This is a welcome change. This past week, I tried to post an article on Facebook for my congregation to read but they received a message that they needed to subscribe in order to access it which was not what I had in mind at all. Thanks!